2 JUNE 2007, Page 38

Power and might Lloyd Evans In Extremis Globe Stre

Power and might Lloyd Evans In Extremis Globe Streets Paved with Gold Oval House Here's a thing. Shakespeare's Globe isn't half as Shakespearean as it's cracked up to be. For starters the original theatre wasn't where the replica now stands, possibly because that part of the bank would have been mid-river. It was sited a few hundred yards inland in the car park of what is now a yuppie estate. The external structure has been closely researched and is genuinely authentic, but because no pictures survive of the interior the present internal design is all guesswork. And my guess is that their guesswork is wrong. The stage looks too gaudy and fussy. Its rear elevation is tarted up like a Tibetan monastery with various crenellated decorations and odd little columns painted to resemble crimson marble. The two massive forward columns are faked up in the same way, with blurry red swirls streaked with white and grey, like diseased gums. Those details have never looked right to me and I was pleased that in this production of In Extremis those hurtful thrusting columns have been veiled in midnight blue cloth. Let's hope their discreet new overalls remain permanently. Howard Brenton's play, finely directed by John Dove, traces the whirlwind romance between the medieval theologian Peter Abelard and his 13-year-old pupil Heloise.

Abelard was ahead of his time. A rationalist, an Aristotelian and a protoProtestant, he wanted to wrest religious power from the dusty erudite monks and return it to the ordinary man in the pew. A perilous mission in the Middle Ages and this play is a heady brew of sex, intrigue, violence and theology. Some of the philosophical dialogue is genuinely thrilling and dramatic (and readers of Plato will know how improbable that sounds). The King of France stages a public debate where the ascetic reactionary, Bernard of Clairvaux, clobbers the young Abelard with a knotty theological conundrum. How can Christians revere the writings of unbaptised Greeks who had no knowledge of Jesus? Abelard pauses. He seems floored. Bernard has won. But after a moment's reflection Abelard is back and he's arguing. Did God make nature manifest to man from the first days of creation? He did. Therefore reason, which is part of nature, was apparent to man and worked within him from the very beginning Thus through the eternal operations of reason God has granted even heathens like Aristotle and Plato the power to glimpse the divinity of Christ, as it were, by a species of logical premonition. As arguments go that one is ingenious, philosophically flimsy and poetic rather than rational but on stage it's marvellously unexpected and persuasive. I could have done with more along those lines but the play has a dramatic journey to pursue.

The lovers' doomed affair is played for panto laughs rather than for poignancy or passion, and the second half (after Abelard has been castrated by thugs hired by Eloise's family) lacks the sprightly firepower of the first. Like Shaw's plays, this has more to say about Britain in the last century than about Paris in the 12th. The intellectual excitement, the sense of optimism about sexual freedom and social equality come through very powerfully. Yet Brenton's script is unintentionally sexist. He gives Eloise (beautifully played by Sally Bretton) no decent lines or philosophical arguments and he merely trundles her on like a dessert trolley at regular intervals to gratify the daredevil metaphysician.

At the Oval House there's an entertaining slice of oral history dramatised by Victor Richards. He plays a carpenter, Augustus Cleveland Johnson, who arrives in Britain on the Empire Windrush. The story is familiar. The labour shortage, the hope, the uncertainty, the freezing weather, the landlords' signs and their distressing taxonomy: 'No Irish, no dogs, no blacks'. There's the odd flash of humour too. Shy young Augustus glimpses a group of girls chatting at a tea party. He approaches the prettiest one nervously. 'Excuse me, madam. You look like a very strong lady. Would you consider marrying me?' Her friends collapse laughing. 'Yes,' she says, 'but you'll have to meet my relatives.' The audience loved this performance, and Richards has a genuine desire to preserve the consciousness and identity of his people. Yet there's a fine line between the noble cause of recording social history and the less noble cause of wittering on about the durability of plain Hovis back in the 1950s. Streets Paved with Gold, code for dashed expectations, hovers perilously close to nostalgia. We know the streets of Britain aren't paved with gold. Right now they're paved with the bodies of black teenagers bleeding to death. About that this show is silent.